Lego Website Lectures Anyone Who Thinks It's Legos

from the chill-out dept

Legos may be a fun toy, but it seems that some of the marketing folks there are fairly humorless when it comes to their website. The company wants to protect its brand, which is fine, but if you accidentally type in legos.com rather than the more appropriate lego.com, the company doesn't just forward you to the proper website -- it gives you a lecture on how to properly spell their name. Oh yeah, they also want to focus on the fact that the brand is completely capitalized, but we're not going to give in to that either.

No Subject Given

Of course, if you type in "kleenex" or "q-tips" you get a sadder redirect:"because we were branding idiots, we never defended our brand names and thus have little control (and shrinking market share) over the innovations we brought to market"....

Re: No Subject Given

Heard that back in the 80's, Xerox was sending out letters asking their customers to not to use their brand name in place of the word "copies", or as a verb:

"I'm going to xerox this report"

"I'm going to make some xeroxes(sp?) of this report"

Apparently, they feared the X word would slip away and become public domain. I don't know what the law says, but I worked for a competing brand at the time, and we thought it really curious, seemed like the kind of brand recognition that most companies would give a left one for.

Legos

It's a part of America!! Fight the Lego Power!I was just thinking about how snooty they must be cause you can't just go out to wal-mart and buy a huge bucket of them like you could when I was a kid. You have to buy some dino-movie-maker-bio-astro-knights-amonga kit to get anything...

Re: Legos

Yeah, but you can buy a giant tub of generic Lego-compatible blocks at Wal Mart for about what the giant tub of real LEGO used to cost. I use them to build mold boxes for pouring RTV molds because it's easy to build them to a convenient shape. And I don't have to pay like fifty bucks for a brand name. You'd think if they want to enforce a copyright they wouldn't have let anybody sell blocks that use the same interlocking pattern. Otherwise, what's the point?

Re: Legos

You can go to a LEGO store and buy basic buckets of bricks. Just because WalMart doesn't stock it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.And good for LEGO for protecting their name. It's only America that tries to call it Legos anyway. I think there's also legal precident where they can lose their trademark if it's used incorrectly too much.

legality

They're doing it to protect their copyright status. By law if you don't make an effort then you can lose it. Effort is the key word though, they don't really care if people say legos I bet but in the future they may need to tell a court that they've made efforts in protecting their copyrights.

Lego? Who cares?

Who the fuck cares about legos anymore, ever since they started coming out with these pre-fab blocks that have just about zero creativity-inducing quality? Buying new lego is an investment in brainwashing. Building stuff with the old school blocks will make you a genius.

Dear lord

LEGO bricks

They're not "legos" (grief, that was hard to write!), they're "LEGO bricks" (bricks made by the LEGO company). Using the term "one lego, two legos" is like saying "one sheep, two sheeps" - just makes you sound ignorant.